Relational reasoning, analogy-making, and high-level cognition.
I am particularly interested how such high-level tasks, which require
role-filler binding, can be implemented in biologically realistic neural networks.
In the words of my former advisor John Anderson (and Allen Newell before him),
How can the human mind occur in the physical universe?
My specific interest is in human -- that is, relational -- cognition.

Visual cognition, particularly the extraction and encoding of relations
among two or more objects in a visual scene.
Again, I am particularly interested in biologically plausible models of the
underlying neural mechanisms.

Methodologically, research in the
CogMod/CCN Lab
involves a combination of behavioral and psychophysical experimentation,
mathematical and computational modeling, eyetracking and pupillometry.
Typically, the papers that we publish involve both empirical data and
computational models. We also use and develop sophisticated models to analyze
the behavioral data collected in the lab or in collaboration with other labs.